May 11, 2010

American Ballet Theatre at 70

American Ballet Theatre’s opening night gala this year on May 17th is apparently intended to be just that, a gala for opening night of its annual spring season at the Metropolitan Opera. Celebration of the company’s 70th anniversary took place on a couple of evenings in the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum. A panel moderated by Rachel Moore, the company’s Executive Director, with Donald Saddler, who danced in the company’s first performance on January 11, 1940; Lupe Serrano and Susan Jaffe, former principals; and Susan Jones, former dancer and present ballet mistress, discussed various aspects of the company’s history. Present members of the company danced excerpts from this season’s repertory, some of which were also relevant to points made in the discussion.

Thus, the first two numbers were both from Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream,” making a welcome return this season: the quartet of mortal lovers, confused and quarreling, danced by Stella Abrera, Marian Butler, Jared Matthews, and Sascha Radetsky, and the duet of Titania, infatuated with Bottom transformed into an ass, danced by Xiomara Reyes and Alexei Agoudine. Both illustrated the plot element of their being bewitched by Oberon so that they fall in love with the creature they first behold, though this was not explained to the audience on this occasion.

Rachel Moore did mention that Lucia Chase had intended to invite Ashton to join the choreographic team of the original company in 1940, but in fact ended up with Antony Tudor, so there was a somewhat tenuous connection to its early history here. Otherwise Tudor was not represented in the evening’s excerpts, though there will be performances during the season of the recently reconstructed pas de deux from his “Romeo and Juliet.” Donald Saddler, in his reminiscences of the company’s early days, rightly said that Tudor had the most influence artistically at that time, an influence that members of the company were able to absorb because they were “young and malleable.”

Susan Jones, Lupe Serrano, and Susan Jaffe all talked about the various productions of “Swan Lake” that ABT has presented over the years. In England in the 30s, Ninette de Valois realized that it was necessary for her young Sadler’s Wells Ballet to acquire the 19th century classics as the essential basis for the repertory, and it seems that Lucia Chase had a similar reason for presenting David Blair’s traditional production for ABT in the 60s. But over the years evening-length ballets have assumed a preponderant role in ABT’s repertory, at least in the spring and summer seasons at the Met, and these are no longer necessarily classics — there have to be new or at any rate recent works in the genre. “La Bayadère,” that is to say, in Natalia Makarova’s version, is one thing, a true 19th century classic by the great choreographer Marius Petipa, but John Neumeier’s “Lady of the Camellias,” dating from 1978, which has lately assumed some currency here and there and will be seen at the Met in June, is something else. An amusing typographical error in the program identified the participants in a pas de deux from this ballet as Manon and Des Grieux.“The Lady of the Cameilias,” of course, is about Marguerite and Armand. In any case, this was one of those modern pas de deux in which the woman is hauled around in ungainly positions, slung over the man’s shoulders like the proverbial sack of potatoes—poor Marguerite, after all, isn’t feeling very well. Veronika Part and Eric Tamm gave it their all. But once again one wished that ABT would spend the money on a full reconstruction of Tudor’s “Romeo and Juliet,” a true masterpiece.

The pas de deux from Jerome Robbins’s “Fancy Free,” on the other hand, which appropriately illustrated ABT’s record of presenting innovative new work in its early years, is as fresh as ever in today’s programs, showing how a duet can depict a real relationship between two individuals. It was charmingly danced by Isabella Boylston and Sasha Radetsky.

I should add that in the trio of Shades from “La Bayadère,” Abrera, Isabella Boylston, and Yuriko Kajiya demonstrated the flawless classic technique of the company’s soloists and corps de ballet, while Abrera and Part, as Nikiya and Gamzatti, duked it out, as Rachel Moore said, in their fight scene, in mime worthy of a silent movie.

Serrano and Jaffe told us what it was like to be in ABT in the old days, when the company toured for as long as ten months of the year, after a short rehearsal period in which everyone was paid $50 a week. Touring in those days often meant one night stands, as many as eleven in a row, traveling by bus. As Serrano said, you had your own ballets, as opposed to the situation now when every ballet has several casts and you have to wait your turn. In earlier times, programs mostly consisted of three one-act ballets and a pas de deux. The one from Petipa’s “Don Quixote” was staged by Anatole Obukhov (for the first time outside Russia, I believe) for Tamara Toumanova and Anton Dolin in 1944. Later, it was memorably danced by Serrano and her fine partner Royes Fernandez, among many others. Nowadays, we see it as part of the complete ballet, but it was danced at the end of this evening by two soloists, the ever-smiling Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, and as usual it brought down the house.